LAUREN BITTNER: It’s really hard to maintain friendships as an actor. A lot of my friends are in New York [ed. note: Bittner is originally from New York] and it’s really hard with the time difference to talk. I don’t wake up until they’re at work. I couldn’t have a more different life than a lot of my friends, and that’s kind of hard on the friendships. They have great paying jobs and they’re getting married. They’ll call me and say, "How are you?" And I’ll say, "I’m going to this audition today, and then the beach because I need a tan for the part." There’s just silence at that point.

TINA MAJORINO: Once you start getting successful within this business, it’s kind of hard to continue friendships with people that you had in your life before you became successful. They just don’t understand. It’s a matter of relating and, really, how can anyone relate to that? It’s just weird. They’re never going to get it. Unless you experience it first hand, it just seems like some kind of silly story. It’s a huge deal because I don’t really hang out with actors.

HAYLIE DUFF: In the last year of my life, I got rid of a bunch of my friends and people around me. They really didn’t care about me and they really weren’t my true friends. You can count my real friends on two hands. There were things that I found out had been going on with them, things that they’d done. I just don’t want to surround myself with people who wouldn’t be there for me no matter what.

JENNIFER HALL: People blossom at all different times. So you have to constantly encourage your actor friends who haven’t blossomed yet to keep at it, and when you say that, they look at you and they think, "Easy for you to say, you’ve gotten everything." And then with boyfriends, forget about it. My current boyfriend isn’t in the industry and it’s the best thing ever. I’ve dated actors; it’s devastating and disastrous. If my career would ever take a step forward and theirs didn’t, I’d have to either pretend that my career wasn’t going anywhere or I’d just have to end up living these double lives, where I’m excited about what’s going on in my life but faking that I’m not.

NORA ZEHETNER: My boyfriend now isn’t an actor. My last one was an actor and that was more difficult, because it can be a little competitive. I remember one time in one of the films I did, I had a love scene and my ex-boyfriend flipped over it. It was constant fighting for a few weeks. My current boyfriend is very supportive. I was gone for a couple of months shooting something and he was here in L.A. and it was fine. We didn’t have any problems and he didn’t get jealous and think that I’d end up sleeping with one of my co-stars.

HAYLIE DUFF: I date non-actors. That’s what I do. I’ve been with the boy that I’m with now for two years. In the middle of that two years we were apart for a year. In that time, I dated a couple of different people. I dated some actors and I dated some non-actors and I dated a director. There’s nothing like dating someone who doesn’t want to have anything to do with [the film world]. There’s just something that’s different about a guy who is doing the same thing that you are doing.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Honestly, I’ve never dated anyone in Hollywood. My boyfriend right now, we’ve been together over two and a half years. We’re just down to earth, normal people. We don’t really like going out to clubs or doing anything with the Hollywood scene. We’re really extremely boring and just like to watch movies and go to Barnes and Noble and that’s about it. I just don’t see how two actors dating would work. I guess a few people have made it work, but typically it doesn’t work. I think that in general–and I’m hoping that I’m an exception to this rule–actors are a little kooky. It’s hard to get both of those energies together; you need to balance it out and have two different worlds come together instead of two people from the same place.

TINA MAJORINO: I’m friends with a few actors, but the people that I hang out with have nothing to do with the business. When you make that your dating pool and you are trying to date someone who has never been in the business, it’s really hard for them to understand. It alienates you completely.

NORA ZEHETNER: I’ve definitely read things that I’ve supposedly said in interviews that I either haven’t said or that have been really taken out of context. My boyfriend read an interview I did where I was asked if I had anyone to keep me company in L.A. and I was like, "My two dogs." My boyfriend said, "What about me?" He was upset and gave me the hardest time about it. There was another article that had me saying "Yikes" about something. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever said the word ‘yikes’ in my life. It was a complete misquote. Then they strung together two other things I’d said on different topics to create one big statement that I never really said. You can’t really get used to it, so you just try to stop caring about it.

JENNIFER HALL: I have to be careful how I talk in interviews. I was talking about my band and they asked, "Where do you see your music going?" I said, "Car commercials!" And that’s what they wrote. I was like, "I was joking!"

MEAGAN GOOD: I had one boyfriend who wasn’t in the industry and everything was very new to him. He felt violated by a lot of people who were always trying to be in our business. We’d go out for a dinner and then want to go see a movie and I’d be there in the theater signing autographs and taking pictures for 15 minutes and, for him, it got a little frustrating. He wasn’t as understanding as I thought he’d be. Then there’d be guys who were fans and he didn’t know how to handle them. He was always feeling disrespected. He didn’t understand a lot of the ways that I had to go about handling things. It didn’t work out and that was a lot of the reason why.

TINA MAJORINO: I think it’s hard enough for men to want to date women who make more money than they do. On top of that, there are a lot of aspects to being an actor that make it even more difficult to date people–being on set or being gone for long periods of time. There are a lot of guys who need a constant reminder that you are around and it’s scary to send your girlfriend off for three months to another city, another state or another country where she’ll be working with a lot of good looking guys. There’s enough crap that you have to deal with in life every single day that [dating an actor] is not something that I’m interested in adding to the mix. It’s just not worth it. I don’t want to go on a date and have the guy be like, "Well, I went on this audition today."

NORA ZEHETNER: When Brick came out, I was there on my Blackberry 24/7. My boyfriend wanted to kill me, I was just looking up reviews all day long. It was a horrible thing to do. I’d read good ones and then I’d read really bad ones–mean ones about me–and it would then make me feel horrible. Then he’d have to deal with that.

LAUREN BITTNER: I believe in relationships and making them work, but acting is this dream that I’ve been pursuing for a while and as it starts to fall into place, I’d be betraying myself if I didn’t follow it. And that’s hard, because other things sometimes become more important [than the relationship].